Capacious Bucket – Rebel Clash Pokemon Review

Vince

Capacious Bucket from SS Rebel Clash joins the list of type specific support that would be wonderful in few decks in useless on most of them. This is an item card which lets you search your deck for up to 2 Water energies and put them onto your hand. With them, you can use some of those energies as fodder or manual/unlimited attachment for water decks using Frosmoth. This could be a useful card in Standard because there is little to no competition (sans Energy Spinner) regarding search related item cards…

…but it is unfortunately outclassed in Expanded due to another item card called Professor’s Letter that lets you grab up to two of any basic energy, not just water energies. I haven’t seen a situation that somehow 4 Professor’s Letter wasn’t enough to fetch basic energies.

Ratings:

Standard: 3/5

Expanded: 1/5

Limited: 4/5

Otaku

Capacious Bucket (SSH – Rebel Clash 156/202) is a Trainer-Item that lets you search your deck for up to two [W] Energy cards, show them to your opponent, then add them to your hand.  Lastly, you shuffle your deck.  The last two parts almost go without saying; your opponent gets to see what you snagged to prove you didn’t accidentally (or intentionally) grab the wrong thing.  Unless an effect is meant to let you order your deck, you always need to shuffle after searching cards for it, or even adding cards to it.  You should also note that, while the wording doesn’t specify “basic Energy”, the only thing that counts as [W] in your deck is basic Water Energy.

Capacious Bucket is a nerfed Professor’s Letter.  In the Standard Format, Professor’s Letter isn’t legal, so it only has to compete with Energy Spinner, some more deck-specific tricks, and/or some non-Item options.  If the metagame and your deck’s strategy make going second likely, you might want to stick with Energy Spinner even in a mono-Water deck.  In Expanded, you can choose to run Capacious Bucket instead of Professor’s Letter in a deck where you just need to search out basic Water Energy cards, though that clues your opponent into that fact.  Theoretically, a deck might need enough basic Energy search to run both… but probably not.

In the Limited Format, things get a tad weird, but in Capacious Bucket’s favor.  Seeing the current contents of your deck can be very handy, possibly giving you a reason to run Capacious Bucket in a deck without any basic Water Energy.  Of course decks running on basic Water Energy will want to include Capacious Bucket, but even decks that aren’t might want it for the deck thinning, even if they’re not using the Water Energy to cover [C] Energy requirements.

Ratings

Standard: 2/5

Expanded: 1/5

Limited: 4/5

Capacious Bucket might score higher in Standard if Water had more than a scant presence in the metagame.  Even though Professor’s Letter isn’t Standard-legal, I still think Capacious Bucket should grab at least one more basic Energy.  That, or they could just reprint Professor’s Letter.  Though it has mostly low marks, if you even think you might want to run a Water deck over the next few years, you should probably snag four copies of Capacious Bucket.  Hopefully, you get a chance to use them.

aroramage

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